I am the person that organised the event. I put tons of work and it and frankly I am super dissapointed to be accused of such things that we never ever stated. What made you even think we "are supposed" to eat it?

The vaghurt journey was a hard-working amazing project and we took all the measures to ensure the safety of the participants. Did you even see the inactivation of the biomaterials in the program?

Anyway, if anyone has nice questions about the project, please ask. But do not accuse or make a fuss without proper prior informing.

Seems like you could easily culture a pathogen. Michael Douglas would not approve. Anyone want to weigh in on the safety aspects? Today is the day they were supposed to eat it. I would urge you not to.

I am the person that organised the event. We put tons of work into it and I am terribly disappointed that you make wrong assumptions and came with such accusations. When and how did you get to the conclusion that we would eat it? We never stated that.

Please correct the post. I would really appreciate it. It feels really disappointing to assume that we are not scientific and we do not know the risks and we do not take the required measures. In the program it is stated that we will inactivate the bio materials.

Anyway, if anyone is interested in our journey, we will definitely like to share it. It was an amazing project.

Seems like you could easily culture a pathogen. Michael Douglas would not approve. Anyone want to weigh in on the safety aspects? Today is the day they were supposed to eat it. I would urge you not to.

First of all, whenever you isolate an unknown organism from an environmental sample, you really should be doing that in a BioSafety Level 2 lab...

On the other hand, fermenting grapes to make wine, or making sauerkraut (beware, wild lactobacilli!) is also culturing unknown organisms from environmental sample... Yes, using a sample from humans makes it orders of magnitude more dangerous, but still, I would be very surprised if something bad happened. Yoghurt is not a good environment for typical pathogens.

Yes, this is definitely a really bad idea. Not that you couldn't do what they claim to be doing. But the way they're doing it isn't even close to safe. At least, it sounds like nobody is actually going to *eat* this vaghurt, since the program ends with "Visual inspection" and "Inactivating the biomaterials".

First of all, whenever you isolate an unknown organism from an environmental sample, you really should be doing that in a BioSafety Level 2 lab, because there is always some chance you'll be isolating (and greatly amplifying!) a pathogen instead. Check out the answer to my question to ask.diybio.org on this issue:

Secondly, the fact that they're starting from a human sample increases the odds of isolating a pathogen by orders of magnitude. Sure, by culturing in milk they will be selecting for the more harmless lactobacilli. But they're only doing a single day of culturing, and they're not even picking colonies. So there's no chance in hell they'll get rid of anything that may be dangerous. Remember: one person's commensal bacteria is another's pathogens! Nice cup of Candida or STD yoghurt, anyone?

And even if they were able to select a single Lactobacillus strain (which they can't - not with the procedure they described), that's still not a guarantee it would be harmless. We tend to equate Lactobacilli with yoghurt, cheese and other fermented dairy products, but there's plenty of pathogenic ones as well:

You want to do this safely? You do the isolation in a BSL-2 lab, or at least a biosafety cabinet. You isolate colonies and subculture a couple times until you're confident they're axenic. They you use 16S sequencing to figure out what you have, and whether it's closely related to any pathogens. Then you try it *yourself* first, before you start exposing anyone else.

Seems like you could easily culture a pathogen. Michael Douglas would not approve. Anyone want to weigh in on the safety aspects? Today is the day they were supposed to eat it. I would urge you not to.

Yes, this is definitely a really bad idea. Not that you couldn't do what they claim to be doing. But the way they're doing it isn't even close to safe. At least, it sounds like nobody is actually going to *eat* this vaghurt, since the program ends with "Visual inspection" and "Inactivating the biomaterials".

First of all, whenever you isolate an unknown organism from an environmental sample, you really should be doing that in a BioSafety Level 2 lab, because there is always some chance you'll be isolating (and greatly amplifying!) a pathogen instead. Check out the answer to my question to ask.diybio.org on this issue:

Secondly, the fact that they're starting from a human sample increases the odds of isolating a pathogen by orders of magnitude. Sure, by culturing in milk they will be selecting for the more harmless lactobacilli. But they're only doing a single day of culturing, and they're not even picking colonies. So there's no chance in hell they'll get rid of anything that may be dangerous. Remember: one person's commensal bacteria is another's pathogens! Nice cup of Candida or STD yoghurt, anyone?

And even if they were able to select a single Lactobacillus strain (which they can't - not with the procedure they described), that's still not a guarantee it would be harmless. We tend to equate Lactobacilli with yoghurt, cheese and other fermented dairy products, but there's plenty of pathogenic ones as well:

You want to do this safely? You do the isolation in a BSL-2 lab, or at least a biosafety cabinet. You isolate colonies and subculture a couple times until you're confident they're axenic. They you use 16S sequencing to figure out what you have, and whether it's closely related to any pathogens. Then you try it *yourself* first, before you start exposing anyone else.

Seems like you could easily culture a pathogen. Michael Douglas would not approve. Anyone want to weigh in on the safety aspects? Today is the day they were supposed to eat it. I would urge you not to.

Seems like you could easily culture a pathogen. Michael Douglas would not approve. Anyone want to weigh in on the safety aspects? Today is the day they were supposed to eat it. I would urge you not to.

But my genetics background is fairly limited. The plasmid is written out in the paper, but I am looking to be able to have it possibly created for me. I'm looking for someone to help me get to the point where I can purchase it online.

The plasmid is referred to in the paper as pGR4-4iGM3' , and also as pUGiGM3'.

On 06/23/2015 07:50 PM, Brad S wrote:
> Can anyone tell me what kind of equipment and supplies I would need to look
> at telomeres in cells?
>
> This would be to test different substances on the cells to try and activate
> telomerase.
>

You should take that question to the GRG list - there are several
frequent posters there who are involved in exactly this or similar
ventures, and will probably be able to give you some guidance.

Job DescriptionImplement software installation packages and supporting deployment infrastructure on a distributed network for a new product under development.

Candidates for this position should have the following skills:• 1+ years developing software installation packages• Working knowledge Windows Installer Technology• 1+ years C# or WiX (Windows Installer XML) tool set

The following skills would be beneficial but are not mandatory:• PowerShell scripting

A year ago I began an experiment to see how I could store things long term in a DIY manner. The results (note: poor controls. Please don't sue me and take all of this as opinion)

-Plasmids are best stored in E coli stabs

-E coli strains are best stored at -20 at 40% glycerol

Simply put, I put 3 things in the freezer for the year: bacteria culture with 10% glycerol, 20% glycerol, and 40% glycerol. I also put in a stab where I just picked a colony and stabbed it into a tube, normal method.

For the 10%, even though there was clear settling of cells I scraped from the top because the culture was frozen. No colonies appeared on the plate. I did the same with 20% and 1 colony appeared. 40% was not frozen so I just took a tiny from the bottom as well when I streaked and got surprising results

Although I used 1/5 of the small pellet at the bottom, I got *significantly* more colonies than I got with streaking out the entire stab. However, nearly 1/3 to 1/2 of these cells no longer held the RFP plasmid even though I plated on amp. On the stab plate, however (same batch of plates), I did not get a single white colony. There were less colonies, but still about 50 colonies.

So, overall, if you wanna store plasmids without an expensive freezer, store them as stab cultures. I can vouch that it works. (however sometimes mutations can occur in the genomes of the cells in stab cultures http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC516597/ )

I'm looking for co-founders to apply to indie bio to develop functioning biological/electronic brain units that would co-exist with humans as companion cyborgs. Please reply or share if interested. Ideally these creatures will have synaptic nodes on part of skin surface to interface with electronic networks.

Summary: The Quality Control Analyst is responsible for overall quality assurance throughout the application development cycle for the eCommerce group. Through the leadership provided by the Quality Control Manager, the Quality Control Associate will partner with the development team for overall code quality.

GENERAL RESPONSIBILITIES

·Analyze the product features, and the product as a whole, to ensure it behaves as intended

·Ensure that components and features are complete based on the department definition of "done"

·Participate in developing and documenting User Stories, including testing estimates and validation tests

·Write the test cases/scripts – ideally up-front but on a just-in-time basis per feature

·Partner with the developers to ensure all areas of the application are fully tested and issues are clearly logged and prioritized consistently

·Manage the defect log and ensure issues are resolved, including validation of the fix

·Analyze and determine proper testing procedures/processes for testing both hardware and software.

·Participate in developer integration, system integration, and acceptance testing of all eCommerce applications

·Certify software functionality for new Production releases

·Provide exploratory testing to understand the feature and how it is implemented, to find additional or unexpected behavior, and to refine and define additional test cases for the feature